Lifeboat Foundation

Humans are usually good at isolating a single voice in a crowd, but computers? Not so much — just ask anyone trying to talk to a smart speaker at a house party. Google may have a surprisingly straightforward solution, however. Its researchers have developed a deep learning system that can pick out specific voices by looking at people’s faces when they’re speaking. The team trained its neural network model to recognize individual people speaking by themselves, and then created virtual “parties” (complete with background noise) to teach the AI how to isolate multiple voices into distinct audio tracks.

The results, as you can see below, are uncanny. Even when people are clearly trying to compete with each other (such as comedians Jon Dore and Rory Scovel in the Team Coco clip above), the AI can generate a clean audio track for one person just by focusing on their face. That’s true even if the person partially obscures their face with hand gestures or a microphone.

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Biomarkers of ageing based on DNA methylation data enable accurate age estimates for any tissue across the entire life course. Horvath and Raj review the development of these ‘epigenetic clocks’ and how they link to biological ageing.

UNSW scientists in collaboration with European scientists demonstrated that the “DNA”, or spectra, of more than 340,000 stars in the Milky Way could aid them to search the siblings of the Sun, now scattered across the sky.

Scientists actually are working on project GALAH, the survey observations for the ambitious galactic archaeology project- which launched in late 2013 as part of a quest to uncover the formulation and evolution of galaxies. Scientists gathered the data from HERMES spectrograph at the Australian Astronomical Observatory’s (AAO) 3.9-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope near Coonabarabran in NSW to collect spectra for the 340,000 stars.

The data shows that how the Universe went from having just hydrogen and helium soon after the Big Bang to being loaded with every one of the components show now on Earth that is fundamental forever.

Y Combinator announces the first wave of support for biotech startups working on aging.

Earlier this year, the Y Combinator (YC) community showed interest in supporting biotechnology focused on healthspan and age-related disease. The YC community is an influential part of the Bay Area technology-focused industry in California. It was great to hear that it was planning to support biotech startups working on aging through its YC Bio program.

The first area we’re going to focus on is healthspan and age-related disease—we think there’s an enormous opportunity to help people live healthier for longer, and that it could be one of the best ways to address our healthcare crisis.

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Jerome Groopman discusses the results of a trial described in the New England Journal of Medicine, in which twenty-two patients with beta thalassemia, a common and devastating blood disorder, were treated with gene therapy.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Surgeons pack donated organs on ice while racing them to transplant patients but it may be time for a warmer approach. British researchers said Wednesday that keeping at least some livers at body temperature instead may work better.

The livers keep functioning until they’re transplanted thanks to a machine that pumps them full of blood and nutrients. It’s a life-support system for the organs, and similar machines are being explored for lung and heart transplants, too.

The transplant community isn’t ditching affordable ice chests for the far pricier approach just yet. But proponents hope that storing organs in a way that mimics the body might eventually increase the number of transplants — by keeping precious donations usable for longer periods, and allowing use of some that today get thrown away.

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A new open access paper takes a look at the potential of regenerative medicine for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease [1]. The review covers approaches such as spurring the production of new neurons and transplanting new neurons while taking a look at the disease-modeling approaches and techniques that science is now using to refine approaches to treating Alzheimer’s.

The authors here investigate how induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are contributing to the growing knowledge in the field by allowing researchers to create increasingly refined models of Alzheimer’s disease. A current problem we have is that animal models do not emulate the disease closely enough to lead to translational therapies that work in humans; this is why so many new medicines that work in mice fail in clinical trials. The review takes a look at the challenges and how science is working to develop better models.

Introduction

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A man in Paris has become the world’s first to successfully receive two facial transplants.

Jérôme Hamon, 43, underwent his first face transplantation procedure in 2010 to treat neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder characterized by the growth of tumors along nerves in the skin, brain and other parts of the body. Yet Hamon’s body rejected the original transplant.

In January, a team of surgeons and paramedics at Georges Pompidou European Hospital AP-HP, led by surgeon Dr. Laurent Lantieri, performed Hamon’s second transplant.

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